Posts by Alan Brown 15085 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"I quick test using an EE mobile plan where adult sites are normally blocked at the DNS by EE."
That would be the same EE whose adult site blocking nobbled access to the Sarracens Rugby club in Watford? I know about rugger buggers but that's a bit over the top (especially seeing as the Sarracens' site is the only way to know about the availability of certain public parking spaces on match days)
"Vicorian views to morality"
Which were "anything goes" for the most part.
The age of consent was 12 years old and only raised to 16 due to a moral panic over child prostitution (it was felt that younger girls could pass for being 12, but it's harder to pass for being 16)
If you didn't pay your bills, it was commonplace to hire a "cutter" who would hunt you down and do as the job title suggested - usually to your face - as a warning to others.
And the rich lived in terror, behind 12-foot high walls topped with broken glass/razor wire.
The self-appointed policemen of these things (who then managed to be delegated authority) are operating without oversight or auditing of anything they do - and have been caught adding any groups which attempt to analyse their politics and procedures to the blacklist regardless of actual illegal content.
Imagine Mary Whitehouse having actual control of the switch - and deciding she doesn't like sites that criticise the way she operates.
Because use of these filters is _not_ voluntary, there are reasons that such things _must_ have public oversight, else they become the stealth path to a Great Firewall.
Of course in the medium term Elon's Satellite Cloud(tm) is going to blow this entire filtering concept apart as the authorities start playing Whack-a-mole - they will be forced to concentrate on the sources rather than the viewers. I can't see making using Musk Internet illegal going down well amongst those people who can't get broadband services. More to the point I can't really see how using it will be detectable.
> Exactly, too many smart-asses commenting "just use a VPN and then you're perfectly safe and untraceable"!
By the time these skiddies think about using a VPN they (and their online fingerprints) already well-known - plus they like to boast - which means that all it takes is someone observing the skiddy community over a prolonged period to connect the dots sufficiently to get a monitoring warrant.
Various groups have been doing exactly that and building intelligence files on skiddies from the moment they first appeared as young pains in the arse until some point when they're determined to be non-sociopathic and outgrown the behaviour. At first it was other net users who were pissed off about the DoS attacks, more recently it's law enforcement.
"how do we know he didnt take extra IP hiding measures"
He didn't. Most crims (who get caught) simply aren't that smart.
If they were, they'd hold down honest jobs (or start up new religions) - and although you occasionally hear about massive amounts stolen, when you tote up the hours involved they're usually getting less than minimum wage overall. It's some kind of gambling mentality. (big up the wins, ignore the losses)
"and the Mad Skillz of the plod traced it anyway?"
As with many such cases, it was handed to them on a silver platter after a lot of other people did the legwork.
About the only time they did their own legwork was when Peter (weaselboy) Francis-Macrae sent out fake invoice spam with a reply phone number of the Cambridgeshire police HQ's main switchboard in 2003. Then it got personal.
"I am surprised to hear, however, that this is also true of the United Kingdom, even if to a lesser extent."
It used to be the case in Australia and New Zealand too, until the mid 1970s. Both countries now regard drinking as an _aggaravating_ factor when considering sentencing for driving offences.
This comedy sketch originally from 1969 wasn't far off the truth - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_7VHMIXusQ
"Punishment for embarrassing the establishment?"
Nope. Look up the punishments for blackmail sometime - and particularly blackmail "with menaces"
The maximum penalty is 14 years' imprisonment. He got off LIGHTLY compared with sentences handed down over the years.
And then there's the damage he did to the NHS network with his DDoD attacks, puting patient data and diagnoses at risk.
"Whether talented or not, he was a spiteful little shit who who caused a lot of damage and put customers private details at risk"
I'll guarantee that after release, he won't have changed one iota, continues to blame everyone else for his woes (and getting caught) and continues the malicious activities if he can.
He's a carbon copy of several skiddies I've run across and jailtime wasn't a wakeup call for them either.
WRT "join the army" - you might want to consider that the Israelis tried this with 1990s nuisance Ehud "Analyzer" Tannenbaum and couldn't control him. He was last heard of in 2012 being sentenced in a New York district court for hacking banks, but I doubt he's stopped. (Incidentally one of Tannenbaum's standard MOs was to "foster" younger skiddies and train them up to do his dirty work. The guy just keeps popping up again and again when looking into skiddy history. He's kinda like Fagan in this regard.)
"However, a fuckup this large requires either a special kind of stupid"
Never underestimate the stupidity of people in sufficiently large groups - particularly where there are rigidish social structures.
There are more societies where copilots will sit and watch the captain totally screw up and fly a large passenger aircraft into the ground and be afraid to intervene than ones where the crew will scream bloody murder and take over the controls - in fact such cultures have repeatedly happened in corporate america too (including at least one US airline!)
"For the Russian firewalls, are they really down to US belligerence or is it Russia's attitude towards the rest of the world? "
How long do you think any of these terrestrial firewalls are going to be effective for when you have not just Elon's Skynet in operation but several more providing resliience?
You can already send limited quantities of data via Iridium and other non-dish-based satellite services - it's how a lot of the stuff showing the Rohingya massacres got out of Burma in areas where the army would have pounced in minutes had they seen dishes pointing anywhere or anything resembling the usual videocomms kit. As it was, they triangulated on and killed several of the journalists by matching locations in the actual video footage.
It works the other way too - the USA's answer to the "great firewalls" has been to allow legislated monopolies which get away with both choking the living daylights out of connections, making them too expensive for most consumers and making it harder for middle america to reach neutral news sources (If you've ever spent time there you'll know that the average middle-american newspaper might have at best 3-4 pages of out-of-state news, with half a page of international news. Parochial is somehow not quite enough to describe it)
"A real thief does not get caught. A clever con is out in the open."
The best cons are pulled off by offering payoffs in the next life. They have people flocking to give the scammer money and violently attacking anyone who questions or points out the scam.
Some of the biggest such cons have managed to pull off being tax exempt.
"Telling your boss something is wrong is tantamount to an admission of failure or incompetence, even if it isn't your fault. So nobody does it."
Yup. Exactly this - and we had _exactly_ the same problem and the same responses in both Japan and Korea.
It turned out the solution in both countries was to find ways of politely bringing it to senior management attention in a way that couldn't be ignored and then passing it to one of the local media outlets if it was - because media in both countries took great delight in showing up such failings - guess who took the heat for THAT? A few such incidents and notifications from JP-CERT tended not to be ignored, although I suspect a few admins ended up looking for new jobs.
"Maybe it is time to start requiring adoption of MANRS or equivalent"
It's well overdue for that - and to start threatening automatic _de_peering of networks who spew regularly or for prolonged periods until they implement it.
FWIW: If you think BGP is bad, the world's telephone routing protcols are similar to BGP and have even LESS concept of network security.
The assumption is that anyone who can plug into the phone networks at that level is trustable - which has led to some "interesting" phone prefix hijacking over the years (such as blocks of Niue and Chile unallocated area codes being used for porn lines answered in London whilst charged the full international termination rates to clients)
I've dealt with their mistakes for longer than that.
Given the stuff I've encountered and the reactions to being told about it (ranging from "nothing" to changing the ports/ip on the boxes concerned, or simply blocking the emails) I'm more than willing to believe widespread incompetence (and unfireable management) rather than malice.
One of the problems with entrenched nationalism is a kneejerk hostile response to foreigners saying "you have a problem with this" - something not unique in any way to China but more pronounced in quasi-military and large-scale bureaucratic structures.
Low level US military network admins didn't take kindly to being told XYZ system was spewing all over the net either - but in that case there was an established path to go up the food chain, get things fixed and "deal with" the admin concerned. The same path was able to be used to deal with federal/state/local gov employees who preferred to dickwave than fix things.
China (and a bunch of other countries) needs the same kind of escalation ability. The same things keep happening because the same people are in the same places in organisations, getting no heat for screwing up and generally not implementing changes - for the most part because it's "not invented here"
Is that there HAVE been multiple documented cases(*) of corrupt FBI and CIA agents prosecuted for various crimes including stealing evidence (large quantities of bitcoin come to mind) and blackmail, so anyone who's doubting that this might happen will be confronted with evidence to that effect if they start searching for it.
You don't need to be guilty in such a case, the accusation coming from a real agency would be enough to be devastating.
(*) In all such cases the agents had been getting away with it for a while too.
"powerco's plans to switch to wind/solar"
Will probably fail without massive direct and indirect subsidies.
Large windmills have an alarming tendency to self-destruct and in the process toss bits of themselves considerable distances. Solar is peaky. Neither even _begin_ to make sense without forcing the generator to install buffering systems.
"Iceland does the same thing with piping the down stream heat from their geothermal power stations "
Battersea power station's waste heat used to provide district heating to a bunch of nearby buildings.
It's an old concept - so old that the "Heat" part of the "Heat and light" in Edison's original power stations referred to district heating, not electricity.
" I'll sit there doing fuck all for a few years, taking the flak for doing telcos bidding."
This is _exactly_ the problem.
Ofcom have claimed fiefdom over what SHOULD be the Competition and Markets Authority's job instead of sticking to technical matters and the CMA have let them do so.
It was exactly the same situation in New Zealand that let things fester there for so long - a situation that only ended when their Ministry of Commerce parked tanks on the Telecom regulator's lawn and made it clear they weren't allowing the cozy wee self-congratulating shitshow to continue due to the degree of damage to the economy that had already been documented.
At that point the BT/Openreach model was offered and meekly accepted by NZ's Telco regulator.
The NZ MoC looked at it, documented BT's ongoing and egrarious UK market abuse and said "Yes this might work - but only if they are _completely separated_ dialtone/services and lines companies - and by the way you don't get any more broadband rollout funding until it happens. Hurry up."
The result is that NZ's version of Openreach is lean, mean, sells to all-comers and the NZ telecom market has changed from being a posterchild taught in many countries of how NOT to privatise your phone systems to a pretty good example of "doing it right".
Having said that, Chorus NZ is suffering from MBA disease already and faces prosecution for allowing contractors to pay below minimum wage, so nothing's perfect - but as a lines company which lives or dies on lines service it has a vested interest in making sure _ALL_ its customers are happy - the only unhappy one is the former Telecom NZ (Spark) which whines regularly about the costs being "too high" despite everyone else being happy they're less than half of what they used to be.
"As for renewables: China is already the largest generator of both solar and wind power."
The problem with renewables is that with the best will in the world. they simply can't generate enough electricity to decarbonise the world.
They can generate enough to replace 2000s-level carbon-sourced electrical generation but that only accounts for about 30% of all carbon emissions. Tackling the other 70% takes somwhere between 6-8 times that capacity - and the only answer for that is nuclear power.
China's been pulling out all the stops investing in ALL R&D paths whilst the west has stuck with fusion - which still won't be ready in my great-grandchildren's lifespans.
We don't have that long. If the oceans get warm enough to start causing methane clathrate deposits to pop out (some are starting to bubble out already) then the result is likely to be a nasty positive feedback chain reaction resulting in most plant life being killed off by the resulting acidic rain caused by CO2 levels spiking a long way higher than they are now - not global warming - it's happened before in geological history and some estimates are that the entire scenario (including mass extinctions and oxygen levels plunging to 11-12%) played out in less than a decade each time.
If China gets usable _safer_ nuclear online (based on the molten salt tech that Nixon killed in 1972), then they may just be the worldsavers we didn't know we needed.
"I would be following the major banks and buying gold with the dollars."
Only if you can actually touch and hold the metal.
There's at least 3 times as much gold being traded as actually exists. When the wheel stops spinning a lot of people are going to feel quite hard done by.
"The US has the biggest market, and cutting off your profits to spite your face just isn't a likely outcome."
Firstly, the USA is _not_ the biggest market,, nor is it the largest economy (it's third) and it's stagnating. As a percentage of the overall world market a number of large multinational companies don't bother doing business there due to the entrenched parochialism and systemic problems encountered - or if they do, they treat it as a minor operation.
Secondly, for all the dickwaving coming from the USA - and it IS dick waving - the chinese have an iron grip on the dangly parts that matter below - the moneybags.
The USA is a bit like a blowfish - with a few very loud voices far louder than their economic worth - Hollywood could be hoovered up wholesale by Google using spare chance form down the back of the sofa as one example.
China's manouvered itself into in a position where it can say this:
"If you fight, we’ll call in your mortgages. And incidentally, that’s my pike you’re pointing at me. I paid for that shield you’re holding. And take my helmet off when you speak to me, you horrible little debtor."
If it does so, the USA has _zero_ choice but to go home - humiliated without a shot being fired - the reason being that the _moment_ it defaults on any of its debts or is seen to go to war to avoid them, the mighty US Dollar will cease being the world's chosen trading instrument. It's been rumoured for years that the _real_ reason for Gulf War 2 was because Saddam Hussein had started trading oil in Euros and the USA couldn't allow that habit to spread.
The last set of big wars over who owned global trade was fought between the UK and Germany, starting with rivalries in the 1860s and military buildups from the 1880s - culminating in round one in 1914-1918 and round two in 1939-1945. The answer that time was "The USA thanks you"
The time before that was between Spain and Portugual - with the UK coming out the winner after some sideline fun with France.
If the USA chooses to go head to head with China, who will come out on top in trade? India? Nigeria? Whatever the answer, it _won't be the USA.
"The only loser in the long term in the US and global consumers!"
The US, certainly.
Global consumers? Probably not.
The USA's form of power projection (economic and military) has been establishing a damaging hegemony over the last few decades.
People may decry captialism, but when done right - as it has been in a lot of places - it's pulled 3-4 BILLION people out of poverty. The problem is preventing capitalism turning into mercantilism as it has in the USA.
Adam Smith is quoted by many, but they always miss out the parts where he says there are limits to growth and that companies must always operate in an _ethical_ manner. It's a bit like watching bible quotations being bandied about to justify the most horrific activities and crimes imaginable.
"Do not underestimate the dragon."
Until approximately 200-400 years ago, China was one of the advanced and influential world powers. What happened (apart from gunboat diplomacy) was the industrial revolution - more precisely it _DIDN'T_ happen in China to anywhere near the extent it happened in the rest of the world, mostly because the energy sources (coalfields) were inland and largely inaccessable to most of the population, but also due to a long period of navel gazing and rejection of advanced mechanisation technology - both those contributed to the ease with which the western powers were able to to subjugate China's leadership (The Portuguese effort to destroy the Silk road and make themselves the dominant sea power by pounding african ports which had a long history of chinese trade flat - and "liberating" Burma from Mongol control had a lot to do with it too)
However..... China's been defeated and invaded many times before. The standard tactic is to absorb the invaders over a couple of centuries. Just like Arnie "They'll be back". They've had a few false starts over the 20th century but they do seem to have found their footing now.
One should be very careful about irritating dragons. For one is crunchy and goes well with ketchup.
"The gas-turbined trains never ran well, they found the gas turbine spat its dummy a lot..."
Gas turbines are sensitive wee beasts and will do so at the drop of a hot unstart - which at the hands of an unskilled (or uncaring) operator is trivial to do.
Pilots are a lot more careful about starting these because they tend to either have to pay for the damage and/or after a couple of incidents they become ex-pilots.
Gas turbines are also only worthwhile if they can be run at near full load. Anything else is going to be highly inefficient.
"APT failed because of politics in nationalised British Rail"
Most of said politics being the remnants of the nationalised companies scrapping with each other as if they were still competitors - the reason the Central Line (and several others) was torn up was because the operating company was bankrupted and subsumed into one of the larger 4 before nationalisation and those power rivalries just kept on giving all the way to the Beeching reviews.
THAT is typical British management failure at work. When you merge competing companies you don't LET the management in the old ones stay if they keep that shit up.
It's the same basic cause that did for British Leyland (the overall incompetent management and contempt for the customer who'd "buy british no matter what" didn't go away when the export markets started making their feelings about quality very clear by voting with their wallets)
"not cheat by attempting to undercut them later."
If you do the wheeling and dealing right, you can ensure the undercutting badly hurts those making the offer whilst removing most (if not all) of the usual conditions they'd apply, essentially making the project a "gift" with no strings and no repayments.
Such is the fun when you're dealing with countries that are driving a political, not a business agenda. China's taking advantage of the world free trade system in the same way that Germany did in the 1840s-1914 period (by being good at it) and facing the same political forces that caused Germany to feel compelled to build a bluewater navy.
The difference _THIS TIME_ is that China's also building an extensive land transport system for moving goods across Eurasia and Africa that can't be blockaded along with a backstop land route into Africa whilst re-establishing a number of major African trading points that the Portuguese pounded flat 500 years ago as part of their effort to establish themselves as a sea trading power by destroying the Silk Road (which also included teaming up with the Burmese to revolt against the Khanate empire, break the road at its most strategic point and allowed the burmese to then start invading their neighbours for the next 400 years - breaking a lot of neighbouring kingdoms in the process and ruining healthy trade for a few centuries.)
Yes, their loans come with plenty of strings attached (mainly of the Pax Morporkia variety) but the countries involved see it as crucial to reestablishing themselves without colonial shackles - which STILL exist.
> By contrast, he said the “Chinese model” is “just sign here and you will get a port, an airport, whatever you want.”
Much the same deal as the USA used to offer in Cold War days, complete with clauses minimizing the local content and ensuring that the debts could never be paid off.
In any case, it's far too late unless the other three offer unbeatable terms to keep the chinese bank happy - and there's nothing stopping China upping the ante at that point - much the same as predatory companies do, but without the inherent overall protection of anti-trust or anti-cartel laws, however tissue-paper thin those might be.
"Italy seems to be the poster child example."
There are PR voting schemes and there are PR voting schemes. The differences can be subtle but important.
Italy, Germany and New Zealand all use MMP - The differences are in the national vote level threshold requirements for a party to get seats if they don't win any at regional levels - Germany uses 5% and is very stable (government of concensus), Italy uses 2% and is full of looney fringes (the lunatics have taken over the asylum)
NZ (A former FPTP country) started at 5%, decreased it to 3.5% and so far seems to have keep the looney fringes mostly at bay - enough so that when the country had a referendum on whether to keep MMP or return to FPTP, MMP won a resounding victory (as it did when first proposed, _despite_ mass media opposition from both main parties and business interests all predicting doom and gloom)
One of the more curious effects of MMP - and electing a _small_ number of arguably fringeish parties to national office - is the very bright and unblinking media spotlight they're usually unprepared for. New Zealand's Christian Democrats found this out the hard way as their MPs' less savoury past activities came to light - and then the party compounded their issues by simply "erasing" said MPs from all documented existence and memory in a way that would have made Stalin proud - pretending they never happened, rather than apologising for what _had_ happened.
"e.g. in the case of going massively over budget"
That depends how realistic the budget was in the first place.
I've been on - and witnessed - a number of projects where the amount allocated ended up being half (or less) what'd it had been costed out at in the first place but the people concerned forged ahead regardless.
Come the inevitable rounds of problems, the allocated budget increases, but it ALWAYS ends up costing more than if you'd been allowed to do it properly in the first place, thanks to all the lost time and fudging other groups are forced to do in the meantime.
Worse, some of those fudges and workarounds get locked in place for decades afterwards even if they're damaging compared to the corrected project - because once something's committed it's bloody hard to undo faulty perceptions.
Of course, those who slashed the original budgets are the first to slap themselves on the back and blame everyone else for "budget overuns" that they created (and exacerbated). They're seldom if ever held to account for the damage they do.
"and could easily be expensive."
Hint: free service. "downtime Could be Expensive" == you need to pay for it.
At least he wasn't like the stock market daytraders who actually attempted to sue operators of an IRC network when it went down.
As others have said the critical part is the bugtracking stuff. If you have any sense you mirror that periodically (The "how" part is an exercise for the reader)
"The first exploding capacitor was accidental - the rest were not....."
At one training centre I attended, I was informed that anyone attaching 1000uF caps backwards to the 48V supplies and hanging them out the 2nd floor windows would be subject to disciplinary action.
Apparently there had been a lot of complaints.
"What the market will bear *is* the value of the product"
The best example of this isn't De Beers. It's something much closer to our day to day lives: MONEY.
The pieces of paper in our pocket have value _precisely_ because we all agree that they do, Even their metallic "equivalents" only have as much value as we are willing to give them.
Right now gold is changing hands for around $42k/kg, whilst platinum and palladium are going for about $44-45k/kg - normally the latter two are worth twice what gold is and they haven't changed in value much, so at some point, something's going to "give way", just like that bitcoin bubble finally did.
Things aren't helped by there being an estimated three times as much gold being traded at any given instant as actually exists. When things break there are going to be an awful lot of burned investors and from what I can see a lot of them speak Mandarin.
Another example being Remington Shavers.
Victor "I bought the company" Kiam doubled the price of the things, correctly judging that they were undervalued and their low price was putting consumers off - at the new, higher price and with better marketing, sales ballooned and turned Remington around from a struggling maker that had been spun off from Remington Rand.
"Yes, what is it about the people that these kinds of organisation attract?"
IP lawyers who saw how much $$PROFIT$$ could be made and whose eyes went CHA-CHING!
One of whom managed to be elected chair of ICANN after some _distinctly_ dodgy shit went on back in his home country.
"the implied threat was that if I didn’t enter into negotiations to buy the domain for a few thousand pounds, it would be sold to someone else."
Yup, that's the point about those kinds of offers.
They rely on suckers not realising that they can sue the infringer's pants off and then pour napalm all over the bare arse for good measure.
" If those brands are registered trademarks they *must* pay to protect them against being lost."
It's a _little_ bit more complicated than that.
Trademarks are field-specific
I am perfectly entitled to use FedEx as a trading name as long as it is not in any field that Fedex holds their trademark registration in.
ie: I can be Fedex plumbing and heating, there's zero problem with that at all, and FedEx attempting to bring a trademark dispute or "passing off" action would have a hell off a job doing so unless I was using their logos - in fact, attempting to do so may well find them branded as vexatious if they kept bringing actions against businesses with similar names in unrelated fields.
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